Embodiments of the present invention relate to an optoelectronic apparatus to capture images of a wide-angle scene with a single camera having a continuous panomorph zoom distortion profile. To create a continuous zoom for a human observer, instead of using pixel interpolation in order to maintain the amount of pixels in the final image or moving the optical element to change the magnification and reduce the lens field of view (“FoV”), or a combination of two or more cameras with different FoV, embodiments of the present invention use a distortion profile with a large constant magnification in a central area and a dropping magnification in the rest of the field of view. The distortion profile is designed as to reduce the pixel interpolation and maintain an almost constant image resolution.
Some existing continuous zoom system uses multiple cameras with different FoV in order to archive a continuous zoom effect. By combining the information captured with the two cameras, it is possible to create a zoomed in image without the need to resort to pixel interpolation. However, the fact that multiple cameras are necessary implies tradeoffs with cost, power consumption, size limitations, weight limitations and image artifacts created by the fusion of images coming from different cameras. A solution using only one camera would be free of those tradeoffs.
Existing pure optical zoom system can vary the magnification and field of view of the lens by moving some elements inside the optical lens. However, having moving parts inside optics increase the size and the complexity. For some applications, such as for miniature wide-angle lenses for consumer electronics, the size constraints are too strict to allow the movement of some optical elements to create an optical zoom.
On the other hand, existing pure digital continuous zoom solutions are applying computational operations to the image to modify the output field of view, which as a side effect from having to display with the same output size, create new pixels from the original pixels at some point during the operation. This process is also called upsampling, oversampling or expansion. This can be done through extrapolation, interpolation or other means. These new pixels calculated from digital zoom do not contain more optical information about the scene than the original image. This computational operation is not able to create extra information and is very limited in increasing the output image quality.
There is a need of a camera with a continuous resolution zoom distortion profile and associated algorithms reducing interpolation, maintaining a high quality level of information about the original scene on each pixel.